Book and Video Reviews

There are two components of incorporating wild plants into your life. First is making a positive identification in the field. Second is harvesting and processing the plant and knowing what to use it for. There are a lot of great books on using wild plants for food and medicine once you make that positive field [...]

“The Art Of Outdoor Living; A Resource For The Junior Maine Guide Program” is on my top ten list of most important books on bushcraft and outdoor living, and recently came back into print. It provides clear instructions on a variety of outdoor living skills. The updated edition features 280 pages of revised text, glossy [...]

I’ve never had trouble making big dutch oven meals. At the field school I routinely cook for 10-20 people, and after years of doing so I’m usually pretty pleased with how things turn out. Scaling things down, to the point where I’m dutch oven cooking for 1 or 2 adults, is something I haven’t done [...]

I’m interested in homemade, wood fired ovens, as well as community baking. I’ve read a few books on these topics, and one that I always wanted to get a copy of was called The Bread Ovens Of Quebec. I’ve looked for a reasonably-priced copy for years with no luck. But I just learned that the [...]

Tony Nester is one of my favorite writers on bushcraft and survival skills. I enjoy his easy writing style, and an fascinated and entertained by his descriptions of the southwest. This morning, May 5th here in northern Maine, I woke up early and sat with Life Under Open Skies with my morning coffee. I was [...]

I like first person accounts of life in the bush. There are many from throughout North America that I’ve read, but I also enjoy those from farther afield. Recently I had a day of travel (car, bus, plane), and spent the whole day reading Dersu The Trapper. It’s a true account written by a Russian [...]

I just watched Thomas Elpel’s new dvd Classroom In The Woods; Primitive Skills For Public Schools. It is a documentary shot on location in Montana where he and his team from the Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School take junior high class on a 3-day primitive camping trip. In addition to following the journey of the students, [...]

These are not good times to put out a book on edible wild plants. Unless you’re Samuel Thayer. When I reviewed Thayer’s first book, The Foragers Harvest, I wrote that it is as good or better than anything available on the topic. It has since become the go-to book for students at the Jack Mountain [...]

I just finished Tony Nester’s new book The Modern Hunter-Gatherer; A Practical Guide To Living Off The Land. If you don’t like reading book reviews, here’s the abbreviated version; It’s great, get a copy, read it twice. As the title suggests, it’s a primer for those looking to supplement their diet with wild fish, game [...]

I picked up a book at the library the other day called The New Toughness Training For Sports; Mental, Emotional, and Physical Conditioning. I’ve enjoyed reading it, and think that it applies to survival and outdoor living. Mental and emotional toughness are crucial in survival, but also in bushcraft, camping and probably every other arena [...]

I’ve been reading Eric Brende’s book Better Off: Flipping The Switch On Technology. The book chronicles he and his wife living off the grid and with limited technology for 18 months. With all the current talk about sustainability and the search for new technologies that will make it possible, it makes the point that the [...]

I enjoy reading about aspects of history that are little known – especially with regard to exploration. Fittingly, I recently started reading a book I got at the library by Gavin Menzies called 1421: The Year The Chinese Discovered America. In it the author discusses the Chinese treasure fleets and how they explored the globe [...]

Friluftsliv (pronounced: free-looft-sleev) literally means “free-air-life”, and is translated by Roger and Sarah Isberg for their book as “simple life.” Originally written in Swedish, it was published and reprinted three times there before being expanded and translated to English. Here’s an explanation of the term by Roger from the introduction; It defines the philosophy and [...]

I love to research and travel on the old canoe routes that were the highways before the vast northern forests of Maine had a single logging road. A few years ago I picked up a copy of a book called “The Indian Canoe Routes Of Maine” by David S. Cook, which described many of these [...]

Our new sourdough cookbook is finished and back from the publisher. It has all the sourdough recipes we use on our trips, as well as recipes for simple baking powder breads, easy pie crusts, bannock, and more. Unlike other sourdough cookbooks, our recipes have no perishable ingredients that you probably won’t have with you on [...]

Over the weekend I read Paddle And Portage: From Moosehead Lake To The Aroostook River, Maine by Thomas Sedgwick Steele on Google Books. It’s an 1880 account of traveling the route named in the title, which goes right by our new place in Masardis. I’ve always loved old books, especially if I’ve traveled over the [...]

Black Spruce Journals; Tales Of Canoe Tripping In The Maine Woods, The Boreal Spruce Forests Of Northern Canada, And The Barren Grounds by Steward Coffin is a collection of canoe trip journals of the author’s journeys from the late 1950’s to the mid 1990’s. It’s a dangerous book to read on during a snowy February. [...]

I’ve been thinking about writing a review for Paul Stamets’s book Mycelium Running since I read it last fall. It’s an amazing book about fungi, which most people think are simply mushrooms. The reality, as put forth in the book, is that fungi are the internet of the natural world; communicating over long distances and [...]

Aside from this being a powerful and moving biography, the documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly is a fascinating look at survival psychology. From the DVD: As a young boy, Dieter Dengler watched as Allied places destroyed his village; from that instant, he knew he wanted to fly. At 18, he moved to America, enlisted [...]

Open To Outcome; A Practical Guide For Facilitating And Teaching Experiential Reflection offers some simple, practical tools that are relevant to outdoor education. A brief survey of everyone you know will most likely reveal that among the top five moments of learning in their lives, at least four did not take place in the classroom. [...]

I saw a documentary yesterday called America’s Stone Age Explorers which examined the evidence behind the various theories on the peopling of the Americas. It is the first bit I’ve seen in the mainstream media to challenge the Clovis first theory – the one we were all taught in school about the land bridge at [...]

I’ve got a book from 1972 called The Walk Of The Conscious Ants, by Taylor Morris, that tells the true story of a college professor and his students who decided that instead of taking a semester of regular courses, they would walk from their school in southwestern New Hampshire to Nova Scotia. It’s an interesting [...]

I just finished a book called Caribou Hunter; A Song Of A Vanished Innu Life. It was transcribed by Serge Bouchard in 1971 from interviews he had with Mathieu Mestokosho, an Innu who lived his life in northeastern Quebec. The Innu lived in the region from Lac St. Jean to Labrador and have also been [...]

We make family trips to the library once a week. Last week I got a book called Over The Mountains; An Aerial View Of Geology by Michael Collier. It’s a book of aerial photographs that are stunningly beautiful. The accompanying text explains the geologic features of the photographs. From the introduction: “With this book, I’d [...]

Duane Hanson gave me a copy of Lindsay’s Technical Books catalog when I was up at his place in June. It’s a great resource for obscure how-to books on a variety of subjects such as blacksmithing, building, crafting and science. From the cover of the catalog; “Exeptional technical books for experimenters, inventors, tinkerers, mad scientists, [...]

Lee Valley Tools is a woodworking product supplier who offers reprints of classic books. One I recently picked up is their “Chain Saw and Crosscut Saw Training Course”, a reprint of a US Forest Service publication. It’s a great complement to some of the books on axes in our bibliography. I like it because it [...]

I picked up a copy of the newly-published “New Hampshire Gardener’s Companion” last week at our local bookstore, The Country Bookseller. I’d heard about the book a few months ago and have been looking forward to reading it. It’s part of a series of state-specific gardening books written with the climate, soil and general conditions [...]

This fall on our bushcraft and guide training trip on the Allagash we had two people with us from Scotland. We did a fair bit of fly fishing, and I watched with great interest one our Scottish friends Spey cast. I had read about it but had never seen it before. He showed me a [...]

Based on a recommendation from friend and fellow Maine Guide Bud Farwell, I recently got my hands on a copy of “The One-Eyed Poacher and the Maine Woods” by Edmund Ware Smith through inter-library loan. Since it arrived I’ve been reading with delight the stories about Thomas Jefferson Coongate, the infamous one-eyed poacher. He’s a [...]

This summer marks the 11th year I’ve been composting human manure, or humanure, by a process outlined in The Humanure Handbook. It’s a simple system, with the only inputs being sawdust and hay, that has worked flawlessly for our school and home. To mark the anniversary, I’m reposting the original book review I wrote about [...]

Yesterday I received my copy of “The Forager’s Harvest” by Samuel Thayer, subtitled “A Guide To Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants.” I spent most of the evening reading it and examining the many photos. My opinion is that it is as good or better than the best books on wild edible plants. The [...]

Our town has a big July 4th celebration every year with a parade, a brass band by the town docks, and fireworks at dusk. Our family participated in all of the festivities and had a great time. There is a small bookstore in town and my wife and I know the owner and some of [...]

Typos, Etc.
Anything that appears to be an error in spelling or grammar is actually the author’s clever use of the vernacular, and as such is not an error, but rather a carefully placed literary device demonstrating prodigious artistic prowess.

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